SEATTLE – After 22 years of playing in a closet, the Mariners last season moved outdoors, to a great park big as the great outdoors. For a stadium that put a premium on home runs to center field, the naming rights appropriately were bought by an insurance company.

“Unless you are a power-power hitter it’s not really a flyball park,” Seattle manager Lou Piniella was saying before Game 4 yesterday afternoon. “It’s pitcher-friendly if you can get them to hit it to the big part of the park and you need a good center fielder like [Mike] Cameron.

“But it really isn’t a small-ball ballpark. You need small ball to go with power. You’ve got to have all the ingredients working for you. You have to be able to pitch, catch the ball, go from first to third. You need situational baseball.

“It’s baseball, is what it is.”

For four innings plus last night, Mariner starter Paul Abbott, recycled 10-year minor leaguer, integral part of the Seattle’s post-Junior Griffey program, put to use almost every foot of Safeco Field. In the fourth, Bernie Williams chased right fielder Stan Javier to the warning track near the 385-foot right-center field corner. In the fifth, Luis Sojo lofted another fly to the warning track that Cameron ran down with his back to the plate.

With Abbott having held the Yankees to one situational hit, a Paul O’Neill single through the left side with Jorge Posada running from first; with an overpowering Roger Clemens situating consecutive pitches by David Bell’s ear, the first team to create just the right situation probably was going to win.

Scott Brosius followed Sojo by going the other way into right field with an Abbott pitch on the outer half. Chuck Knoblauch worked the pitcher until he missed the plate at 3-1, moving Brosius up to second. Derek Jeter took ball one, waited for pitching coach Brian Price to talk to Abbott, then got under the next fastball.

Jeter hit it high as the Mariners were riding into the eighth inning of Game 2, farther than the faint of heart thought the Yankees, losers of 18 of their final 21 regular season games, would ever go in these playoffs.

Back, back, back the center fielder went, in the field that was supposed to leave room for fly balls, until he finally ran out. Cameron leaped as high as he could and the ball barely got over his glove, over the wall to give the Yankees a 3-0 lead in one swing.

“A great inning for us that started with two outs,” manager Joe Torre called it. He would refer to it as simply baseball, the way Piniella laid it out in the pregame, the way, not coincidentally, the Yankees have played it to win three championships in four years.

In the eighth, Jeter worked a walk and David Justice hit one to center that would have cleared Mount Rainier National Park, let alone Safeco. The goose eggs by Roger Clemens begat goosebumps, and it really doesn’t matter which came first, when each generally follows from the other. The pitchers are keeping the Yankees in games, they again are seizing with big innings that start small and end with big blasts, just like old times.

The Yankees went to the eighth inning of Game 2 dead on their feet, having hit one home run in 150 playoff innings. The two in last night’s 5-0 victory gave them five in their last 19.

“I don’t know [why],” said Torre. “We are not a home-run-hitting club but it seems like we save them for important times. To hit two home runs to center here is not that easy. This park is pretty fair.”

And Jeter, who has homered twice in three games, is a pretty fair player who, given enough time, eventually will seize a moment and turn a huge game. “I knew I hit it well, but I thought I hit it too high,” he said. “Cameron has robbed me before.

“I just think we’re having better at-bats. As long as we’re swinging at strikes, anything can happen.”

Of course, that’s not true, if they are the kind of strikes a Clemens at his absolute, Hall of Fame, best, was throwing last night. But if you make the strike zone your best friend, the Paul Abbotts of the world no longer look all-world. It will be interesting to see how Freddy Garcia, who was dominant in Game 1, does today against suddenly different Yankee batters in the same bodies.

There isn’t a park, built for pitchers or otherwise, that can hold them now, one victory away from a fitting and proper defense of their title in the World Series.

“Look, they are not world champions for nothing,” said Piniella. “They know how to play. They have played in so many big games that you have to go out and beat them. They are not going to beat themselves.”

Nine games into the playoffs, one game from the Series, this is true again, finally.